Plugin Breakdown: EZdrummer 2 From Toontrack

In this one, I thought we would take a look at the new EZ Drummer 2 from Toon Track. They revamped the first one. It’s leaner, meaner, it sounds better, you’ve got more options, it’s more flexible.

I’m going to give you a brief kind of overview of it to kind of walk you through. Some of the things I think are cool about it — first off, they completely change the user interface. I think it looks great, but this is the vintage kit. It comes with two modern ones. It looks like this. It’s got this loading bar.

[drums]

You know, you can click the drums, brings up all the options. This is pretty new. You can hear all the samples right here. Everything loads faster, you can pitch them up and down, you can change the volume of them, you can change the whole kit if you want right here to this Gretsch. Just for example.

Cymbals work the same way. You also have percussion here on the top right. Claps. Shakers. Tambos. With variations of each. You guys can check this out for yourself.

I’m going to go back to the vintage kit, because this is for sure my favorite.

[drums]

The Vistalites are awesome. Ah, it sounds so good.

[drums]

You know, my only complain with the old one was I felt like the top end had some digital something in it you could kind of call BS on if you wanted to, and they’ve been ironing that out with these new kits quite a bit, I feel like. They’re really natural sounding, they’re really warm sounding, and that’s always a good thing.

This is a great option if you’re — you know, you don’t have access to cut drums in an awesome room, and you’re working with clients that don’t have budgets to go cut drums, program them.

I did it, a lot of people still do it. They sound great these days. So yeah.

Back to the plug-in. Off my tangent. Browser tab. Very similar to the old groove library stuff. Just click. All of your stuff loads automatically when you get this. You don’t have to install anything to get all your old stuff to import over.

Search function is really cool. It’s got this tap to find so this happens.

[tapping snare]

Then I can literally click in kind of the basic skeleton of the beat I want.

[drums]

It automatically quantizes it. One more time.

[drums]

Close enough for me. It shows the results, and it’s going to bring up every groove in my library that’s similar to what I just kind of tapped in.

So here, I can play them.

[drums]

Super handy, super efficient. Especially when you have other people in the room, and you have to throw these things together fairly quickly.

[drums]

So yeah. Makes finding grooves way, way, way easier. The mixer window, moving on, obviously it looks different. You get some more mixing options here. Obviously with this kit, we have plate — other reverb settings we can play with. Then you have bleed as well.

On the modern kit, what do we get… It’s different for each one. So you’ve got overall dynamics here on this parallel compression track. Reverb time. You can pitch the drum heads up and down, as well as the cymbals, which is a cool option.

Then you have overhead and room mic bleed for kick and snare stuff. Back to the vintage kit…

Another really, really, really cool option I like is say you find your groove here in your browser. It’s got this MIDI sort of song builder down at the bottom. You can double click the region.

Now I can edit the groove. We’ll play this. It’s synced up with my timeline.

[drums]

So that’s a hi-hat. Maybe I want it open.

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[drums]

Maybe I want it to try this.

[drums]

Then maybe, ah, screw that, I want it on the ride cymbal.

[drums]

Right. Maybe I don’t like that either, maybe I want it on the floor tom.

[drums]

Right. So you can move things around a little bit.

Now let’s say I don’t like all those ghost notes on the snare drum.

[drums]

I have this amount knob down here.

[drums]

So now it’s just on two and four.

[drums]

Bring the ghost notes back in. Maybe I want the kick drum to be a little louder. I can change the velocity of it.

[drums]

So it makes editing these grooves way, way, way quicker. Way more efficient, way more intuitive, and then I’m able to drag these onto my MIDI timeline here, which is great. I love that. Hit the X and you’re out of it.

I always end up tweaking these grooves. I always do.

The routing on the mixer, you get sixteen outputs now, which is great. You don’t get just like, stereos or whatever. It’s really easy to route them and create your audio channels. Say I want my kick to be — in Pro Tools for whatever reason, you don’t get channel one, and I don’t understand why, but you just don’t, so you have to kick them all down to two.

So let’s say audio one here, make this our kick. Make this our snare. Then if I change this to EZ 2, make this two, make my snare three, make this EZ 3. I can now print the parts if I wanted.

[drums]

Just hit record enable.

[drums]

Right. And then so on and so forth. You do that for your overheads, room mics, whatever.

Then you have audio of your performance, and you can close this, and you can mix it just like you would if you’d recorded the tracks to begin with.

This is a great tool for working with clients with less than stellar budgets, because you’ve got to have good sounding drums. You just have to. You have to have awesome drums and you have to have awesome vocals.

If you can’t afford to go into a nice room with good mics and a good player, this is a great option. These things keep sounding — these things get better — every new release, I’m a little more amazed.

But yeah, guys. That’s it. Like the video, subscribe to the channel, we put out new videos every week. If you’re looking for multi-track sessions to practice mixing on, go to the website.

Leave a comment on the video if you’re still watching. I’ll pick somebody and I’ll give them some free stuff from the website. I’ll give them… Let’s do an ultimate lifetime tutorial bundle, why not.

So leave a comment. Whatever you want, and I’ll pick someone randomly and give them a tutorial bundle.

Anyways, I will see you guys in the next video. I hope you have a great week. Later.